Crucial to Bookchin's concept is the assertion that potentiality exists in the here and now, as not only part of any thing's being, but as the fundamental aspect of it. Because potentiality has a history in the things that preceded it, its creation in the world can be traced as an arrival of interactions (emergence, it would seem, guarantees existence). This potentiality is of central import because the interactivity of reality continually builds towards complexity and subjectivity, and it is in relation to this development that an objective ethics becomes feasible. What fosters such complexity and variety of cognition must too, according to Bookchin, be an intrinsic good, as it encourages development towards the fulfillment of evolution. We therefore have the beginning point for an ethic which consists of both man and nature - to Bookchin's thinking one of the insuperable cleavage points in western philosophy. Because our reasoning and increasing subjectivity finds its origin in the natural world, we are given a grounding for an ethics which encompasses both.
The foremost problem with the myriad conclusions from Bookchin's application of a certain brand of dialectics, is the narrowness of his purview concerning concepts of development. Bookchin's assertion that more complex and subjective phenomena are increasingly arising from the natural, groundlessly imputes a specific teleological thinking onto the natural world. That phenomena have become more complex and subjective in historical time, whether a supported assertion or no, does not guarantee the primacy of this particular characteristic. Assessing reality based-upon the presence, absence, or differing shades of a developing continuum of consciousness becomes problematic when other manners of assessment are marginalized by a specific epistemology-cum-ontology. Ignoring other aspects of being threatens to straight-jacket reality. As the adage goes, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." How we assess the world dramatically impacts what we are able to see.
Bookchin's dialectical leanings, and his assertions that evolution and ecological interactions foster differentiation and complexity, are insights in need of broader social sympathy. Nevertheless, the notion that the pontential created by dialectical processes is an expression of objective morality remains a groundless teleology favoring human ways of being in the universe. While a historical development, from a "metabolic self-maintenance" to more rational self-expressions, may emerge from natural processes, the occurrence of such transformations does nothing to suggest their relationship to the good, whether social or metaphysically defined. Positing such undermines the value of the dialectic from the start: the dialectic itself becomes simply a manifestation of supra-mundane phenomena. We risk an interactive reality driven primarily by some illusory Other - beware the realm of Forms. While Bookchin has certainly made headway towards a more integrated perspective on people and things, his insistence upon the cumulative nature of the dialectic remains problematic.
